Aaron Swartz, a wizardly programmer who as a teenager helped develop
code that delivered ever-changing Web content to users and who later
became a steadfast crusader to make that information freely available,
was found dead on Friday in his New York apartment.
An uncle, Michael Wolf, said that Mr. Swartz, 26, had apparently hanged
himself, and that a friend of Mr. Swartz’s had discovered the body.
At 14, Mr. Swartz helped create RSS, the nearly ubiquitous tool that
allows users to subscribe to online information. He later became
an Internet folk hero,
pushing to make many Web files free and open to the public. But in July
2011, he was indicted on federal charges of gaining illegal access to
JSTOR,
a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary
journals, and downloading 4.8 million articles and documents, nearly the
entire library.
Charges in the case, including wire fraud and computer fraud, were
pending at the time of Mr. Swartz’s death, carrying potential penalties
of up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines.
“Aaron built surprising new things that changed the flow of information
around the world,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at the Cardozo
School of Law in New York who served in the Obama administration as a
technology adviser. She called Mr. Swartz “a complicated prodigy” and
said “graybeards approached him with awe.”
Mr. Wolf said he would remember his nephew, who had written in the past
about battling depression and suicidal thoughts, as a young man who
“looked at the world, and had a certain logic in his brain, and the
world didn’t necessarily fit in with that logic, and that was sometimes
difficult.”
The Tech, a newspaper of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
reported Mr. Swartz’s death early Saturday.
Mr. Swartz led an often itinerant life that included dropping out of
Stanford, forming companies and organizations, and becoming a fellow at
Harvard University’s
Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.
He formed a company that merged with Reddit, the popular news and information site. He also co-founded
Demand Progress,
a group that promotes online campaigns on social justice issues —
including a successful effort, with other groups, to oppose a
Hollywood-backed Internet piracy bill.
But he also found trouble when he took part in efforts to release
information to the public that he felt should be freely available. In
2008, he took on PACER, or Public Access to Court Electronic Records,
the repository for federal judicial documents.
The database charges 10 cents a page for documents; activists like Carl Malamud, the founder of
public.resource.org,
have long argued that such documents should be free because they are
produced at public expense. Joining Mr. Malamud’s efforts to make the
documents public by posting legally obtained files to the Internet for
free access, Mr. Swartz wrote an elegant little program to download 20
million pages of documents from free library accounts, or roughly 20
percent of the enormous database.
The government shut down the free library program, and Mr. Malamud
feared that legal trouble might follow even though he felt they had
violated no laws. As he recalled in a newspaper account, “I immediately
saw the potential for overreaction by the courts.” He recalled telling
Mr. Swartz: “You need to talk to a lawyer. I need to talk to a lawyer.”
Mr. Swartz recalled in a 2009 interview, “I had this vision of the feds
crashing down the door, taking everything away.” He said he locked the
deadbolt on his door, lay down on the bed for a while and then called
his mother.
The federal government investigated but did not prosecute.In 2011, however, Mr. Swartz
went beyond that,
according to a federal indictment. In an effort to provide free public
access to JSTOR, he broke into computer networks at M.I.T. by means that
included gaining entry to a utility closet on campus and leaving a
laptop that signed into the university network under a false account,
federal officials said.
Mr. Swartz turned over his hard drives with 4.8 million documents, and
JSTOR declined to pursue the case. But Carmen M. Ortiz, a United States
attorney, pressed on, saying that “stealing is stealing, whether you use
a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data
or dollars.”
Founded in 1995, JSTOR, or Journal Storage, is nonprofit, but
institutions can pay tens of thousands of dollars for a subscription
that bundles scholarly publications online. JSTOR says it needs the
money to collect and to distribute the material and, in some cases,
subsidize institutions that cannot afford it. On Wednesday, JSTOR
announced that it would open its archives for 1,200 journals to free reading by the public on a limited basis.
Mr. Malamud said that while he did not approve of Mr. Swartz’s actions
at M.I.T., “access to knowledge and access to justice have become all
about access to money, and Aaron tried to change that. That should never
have been considered a criminal activity.”
Mr. Swartz did not talk much about his impending trial, Quinn Norton, a
close friend, said on Saturday, but when he did, it was clear that “it
pushed him to exhaustion. It pushed him beyond.”
Recent years had been hard for Mr. Swartz, Ms. Norton said, and she
characterized him “in turns tough and delicate.” He had “struggled with
chronic, painful illness as well as depression,” she said, without
specifying the illness, but he was still hopeful “at least about the
world.”
Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author and online activist, posted a tribute to Mr. Swartz on
BoingBoing.net,
a blog he co-edits. In an e-mail, he called Mr. Swartz “uncompromising,
principled, smart, flawed, loving, caring, and brilliant.”
“The world was a better place with him in it,” he said. Mr. Swartz, he noted, had a habit of turning on those closest to him:
“Aaron held the world, his friends, and his mentors to an impossibly
high standard — the same standard he set for himself.” Mr. Doctorow
added, however, “It’s a testament to his friendship that no one ever
seemed to hold it against him (except, maybe, himself).”
In a talk in 2007, Mr. Swartz described having had suicidal thoughts during a low period in his career. He also
wrote about his struggle with depression, distinguishing it from sadness.
“Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you
don’t feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy
that everyone else seems to feel. Everything gets colored by the
sadness.”
When the condition gets worse, he wrote, “you feel as if streaks of pain
are running through your head, you thrash your body, you search for
some escape but find none. And this is one of the more moderate forms.”
Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 12, 2013
An
earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the police who
arrested Mr. Swartz, and when they did so. The police were from
Cambridge, Mass., not the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus
force, and the arrest occurred two years before Mr. Swartz’s suicide,
but not two years to the day.
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